Nine battery storage projects totaling nearly 1,500 megawatts are proposed across Western New York. They’ve been proposed to help meet New York State’s six-gigawatt energy storage goal, a program the state says will store renewable generation “for the times it is needed most,” firming intermittent solar and wind into steady power.
That belief that batteries store renewable energy is the basis for nearly everything that follows. Under state law, a battery project qualifies as a “renewable energy project” for industrial development agency tax breaks: sales tax, mortgage tax, and property tax relief negotiated in place of full assessment. It qualifies for the same 15-year property tax exemption the legislature wrote for solar and wind. And it earns the federal government’s “Clean Electricity Investment Credit.” It’s the argument developers bring to town boards from Ripley to Lockport.
None of those benefits, state or federal, is conditioned on where the electricity actually comes from. So it’s worth asking the question the incentives never ask: when these batteries charge, what generates the power going into them?
In Western New York, the answer, most of the time, is natural gas: 74% to 83% of charging hours depending on the zone (according to NYISO’s own marginal-emissions data). Not just now, but likely for the lifetime of these projects: our modeling finds New York would need five to nine times all the solar it has ever built before charging windows are even half renewable.
